Hero is a Four Letter Word Read online

  “Oh, your face!” Jennet howls. “Did you think that would work?”

  “It always has,” he pouts. “Do ladies no longer like roses? Have they fallen out of fashion?”

  “Do you hear yourself?” Jennet laughs. “You sound like a period drama!”

  Liam drops her hand and turns away, obviously upset, and rubs his free palm on the thighs of his dark jeans.

  “Oh, come on,” Jennet says, calming down. “Don’t get your feathers in a ruffle. It’s a very nice rose. And your manners are lovely. And I do appreciate you not throwing rocks at my windows.”

  He turns back to face her, face twisted in a strange rictus of amusement and horror. “Ladies are not at all what they used to be,” he says, definitive.

  “Nope,” Jennet agrees. “And thank the Lord for that.”

  Liam runs a frustrated hand through his hair, and gold fluffs up like dandelion down. “You’re not making this easy, Jennet,” he huffs.

  “What’s meant to be easy?” Jen counters. “Me?”

  “Oh, no,” he says, eyes immediately round and apologetic. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Tell me how you meant it, then, and choose your words carefully.” She pats her back pocket expressively.

  “How is a man enchanted with a woman meant to behave, if not like this?”His arms spread in askance. The heads of the roses bob, as if to agree with his frustration.

  “Well, threatening the safety of a woman by behaving like a horrible creeper is right out of fashion, now-a-days,” Jen says, and she can’t help the lilt of tease that slips into her voice at the end.

  “And what then?” Liam asks, receptive to her smile. His frustration is ebbing, replaced with interest in her explanation.

  “Most guys chat up women in the grocery store, or in a bar,” Jennet says. “Somewhere public, you know? Sometimes they even call a girl. Or message them on the internet. Send them cards, or knock on their doors. Anything but skulk around, alone in the forest with roses and cheesy lines.”

  Liam grins puckishly and dips another theatrical bow. “But it worked, didn’t it?”

  Jennet snorts. “Only because I decided to listen to you instead of brain you with a branch. Which I may yet regret.”

  “Oh, no you won’t, Jennet,” Liam vows, his eyebrows and the tilt of his chin serious. “I’ll do nothing to make you regret giving me this chance.”

  Jennet snorts again. “Who says I’m giving you any chance? Cocky.”

  He holds out the roses. “Please?”

  Jennet reaches out and plucks the flowers from his hand. A thorn bites into her thumb and it feels good, feels real, so she lets it stay. She buries her nose in the topmost blossom, breathes in the fresh air, good sunlight, clean soil, crisp water. Life.

  His smile doubles, not in size but in brightness. “Will you allow me to escort you home, Miss Carter?” He crooks his elbow.

  “No,” she says. “You’re still a strange man who’s been staring in my bedroom windows. I should report you to the police.”

  “But you won’t,” he hazards, more hope in his voice than she thinks he knows.

  “I should.”

  “But you won’t.”

  Jennet twists her mouth into a moue of disapproval. “You’re a forceful fellow, and too young for me. Go home, Liam, and forget your stupid crush. And I’ll forget to report a trespasser on my property.”

  Liam bites his bottom lip enticingly. “Or you could meet me here again tomorrow and we could talk again.”

  “That’s not happening,” Jennet says, grinning as she waves the rose at him, “But good try. If I see you in these woods again, I will be calling the police. Good day, Liam.”

  “Good day, Miss Carter,” he replies, and turns back into the shadows, and vanishes.

  “How much time do we have?” Liam asks as he pops out from around a fir tree.

  “Jesus!” Jennet yelps, hand pulled close to her breast like a Victorian heroine. Liam laughs and bows a little hello and waits with hands folded behind his back for her to swallow her heart. “Time until what, you lunatic?”

  “Until the police arrive,” Liam says, as if this is the most obvious answer in the world. “You said you’d call them, and you must have seen me out by the forks, or you wouldn’t have come down to the woods. So, how long until they arrive?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “So I know how much time to woo you I have left,” Liam replies. His mouth, his plush bottom lip, is serious; but his emerald eyes spark with mischief. “If it isn’t long, I shall have to forgo the longer poem for a sonnet. They’re not as good, but they’re quick.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Jennet says, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. She hadn’t thought to put on her pea coat this time, too peeved at having caught a glimpse of Liam from her library chair as she was going over the accounts for the first week of the B&B. She had just stormed out, intent on slicing into him with the sharp edge of her tongue. “I haven’t called them.”

  “Oh, Miss Carter, you do care!” he crows.

  “I don’t. I just don’t think it’s fair for an obviously bright young man to get nicked for something that is – and I am really giving you the benefit of the doubt, here – a harmless misunderstanding. Now don’t get it into your head that I condone stalking, because pestering and street harassment are very real crimes. But you seem to be under the illusion that this is allowable, and it’s absolutely, one hundred percent not. So. You’ve been told. I’ve made it perfectly clear. Do not wander around my woods alone, staring through my windows again. Shove off.”

  “I don’t mean to be making you uncomfortable, Jennet,” he says, and his regret does seem genuine. “I’m not stalking. I just like looking at you.”

  Jennet throws up her hands and sighs loud and long. “Which is the exact definition of stalking. So, here it is, my last mercy.” She reaches out and flicks his forehead hard with her fingertip, leaving behind a small red mark. “Are you listening? Next time I will call the police.”

  Next time she does call the police, but they never find Liam. Not even any footprints, they say, none that are recent enough to have been imprinted on the ground less than an hour prior.

  The fourth time, he walks up to her in the supermarket, while she’s trying to decide between two brands of butter, and slips a bottle of red wine into her hand-cart.

  “There now,” he says softly, a dark purr beside her ear, “Is this a more appropriate way to chat up a woman?”

  “Much,” Jennet says, but doesn’t give him the satisfaction of turning to face him. She continues to contemplate her butter.

  Silence. Liam rocks on his heels and Jen reads labels.

  “Well, what happens next?” Liam asks, and his voice held a note of a petulant whine.

  “Oh, you really are bad at this,” Jennet says, and puts one of the tubs back onto the chilled shelf. She places the butter in her basket, pats his shoulder consolingly, and wanders down the aisle. “Thanks for the wine. Good choice.”

  She leaves him standing there, mouth hanging open.

  “Jennet!” he calls, scrambling across the slick tiles after her. “Really. Please. What do I have to do to catch your attention?”

  “You could ask for it,” Jennet suggests, now deeply engrossed in picking a brand of yogurt.

  “I … you …” Liam gawps for a few minutes, and Jennet is happy to realize it is the first time she has giggled since her father died. The realization dampens the glee immediately, but she forces the smile to remain. “Jen … Jennet Carter!”

  She can’t be miserable forever, and despite the rocky, slightly illegal start, Liam is endearing. Cute, perhaps too young, but earnest and right now, Jen needs to feel beautiful. Feel wanted. And it is very easy to call the police if he continues to overstep.

  “Yes Liam?” she asks, choosing a low-fat Greek yogurt and popping it in beside the red wine.

  “Would you like to go on a date with me?” he mutters.
/>   “Yes, Liam,” she says. Now Jennet turns her full attention to him, and graces him with one of her warmest smiles. He seems to grow taller, to unfurl under her gaze, his own puckish grin sliding back across his mouth. “I think I would like that. Let me pay for these, and then why don’t we go to the café down the main road?”

  “I would like that very much, Miss Carter,” Liam replies with another endearingly formal head-tip, and this time when he holds out a crooked elbow, Jen takes it.

  Months pass. Nearly a year since her father died, and Jennet wouldn’t have thought this time last year that she would be smiling by now. Laughing. Flirting.

  Happy.

  And Liam does make her happy.

  The thing is, Jennet knows this is all silly, and doesn’t much mind. She tells Karen that she’s been seeing someone, and that he is far more serious about it than her, and her friend yells “finally!” and pours them both another glass of wine and turns off the telly and adds, “So, details!”

  “None really,” Jennet says. They are taking it slow, oh so slow, because Jennet still hurts behind the smiles. Because she feels guilty for finding joy when her Da is dead and in the ground.

  But Liam is kind, and clever, and quick. He moves like a ballet dancer and smiles like the sun, and he is everything that grief-damp and sorrow-grey Jennet has feared she would never feel again. She is a full decade his senior, and yet he makes her giggle and blush.

  And on their third meeting, when he brushes a sweet kiss across her cheek and asks her to meet him in the woods tomorrow for a walk, she turns positively crimson and agrees.

  So here she is, being honest to goodness wooed as she walks the woods.

  “I like it when you visit me here,” Liam says, guiding her over a split rock in the path. “It feels like our secret.”

  “Not much of a secret,” Jennet says. “My family’s been meeting lovers in the woods for centuries.” She realizes what she’s just said, what she’s just insinuated, and covers her face with her hands, positive her blush is phosphorescent.

  Liam laughs at her discomfort and pretends he didn’t hear it in a gentlemanly manner. “Oh, how those robust, virile Carterhaugh men loved their women. So many children they had, so many little heirs running about, but the families got smaller and smaller. The men loved their women just the same, though.”

  “True,” Jennet allows, still mortified, but unwilling to let her male ancestors have all the bragging rights. “And the women their men.”

  “Look, here,” Liam says, leading them to a gentle stop beside a lump of weed and bracken about twice wide as his own shoulders. “Do you know what this is?”

  “… dead ivy?” Jennet answers.

  Liam grins and crouches down, yanking on the dead vines until a small circle of grey stone is revealed.

  “Oh, a well,” Jen says, kneeling on the moist leaf-mold to peer down it, hands braced on the ground rather than the rim, in case it’s unstable.

  “The well from which Tam Lin was reborn.”

  Jennet laughs. “Oh, no, you know the song, too?”

  Liam laughs with her. “And the tales. But it’s not a tale, Jennet. It’s true. ‘Twas your own ancestor Margaret clung to Tam Lin as the Faery Queen transformed him into a lion, and an adder, and a rod of red-hot iron. She flung her lover into the well and he became a man again, reborn in the waters of a woman. They cleaved to one another their whole lives after.”

  Jennet rolls her eyes. “Which is, you have to admit, the prettiest way to talk about what was probably a road-side tryst. A length of red-hot iron? The waters of a woman? Sounds a lot like shagging to me.”

  “Why Jennet,” Liam says, voice pitched to mimic a particularly offended maiden aunt, and slides down to sit beside her, one of his thighs pressed along her hip. “Your mind is positively in the gutter today. Was there something you wanted to proposition?”

  “My mind is in the gutter?”

  “We could take a roll here, like the heroes of the great tales. Make love in nature. Declare ourselves under the stars, all that romantic nonsense.”

  She is tempted. God she is tempted. It’s been two years since her last serious boyfriend, and there is only so much batteries and fingers could do, but she has no condom and Liam is already dangerously infatuated. What would a twenty year old man allowed to have sex with an older woman think?

  She lets him put his hand on her thigh, fingernails scratching the denim puckering around her knees. Here is the moment of truth. Does she say yes, or no? Or later?

  “What is a hero, really?” Jen muses, instead of answering herself. The coward’s way out, but she needs to think. Not if she’s sleep with Liam, she’d decided she will weeks back. But if she will sleep with Liam right now. Right here.

  And if she does, will she tell him about that before, or after, or not at all?

  “How do you mean?” he asks, palm sliding towards her inseam. She doesn’t stop it.

  Jen smiles and leans into his arm, parting her legs a little further, inviting him to wander northward. Nothing wrong with some harmless flirting. “Was Margaret the hero, because she rescued Tam Lin? She held on, and was granted marriage with Tam for her courage? Even though he told her how to do it all? How to win?”

  “That’s how the other stories go,” Liam allows, accepting the invitation of her spread thights. “Rapunzel tells the prince how to defeat the witch, the princess on the glass hill rolls apples down to the farmer boy; the captive chooses their rescuer and eventual husband, and tells them how to win. It’s less the challenge for the valiant knight that makes him the hero than it is the woman consciously choosing her mate.”

  “So what, their heroism is empty because the princess has already decided? ‘Oh, that one looks humble, and kind. He’s make a good king and he won’t beat me. I’ll pick him to marry me, but I have to make him think he’s winning of his own cunning and strength?’ Some sort of centuries old mind-games that the Grimms and Perrault never caught on to?”

  Liam grins. “Tell me how it is any different now? Men ask to wed a woman after dating them, after spending months or years proving their worth as a husband, as a father, and the woman is the one with the veto power. She says yes, or no.”

  Jen can’t help but echo his grin. “You make it sound like a meat market. That’s not what it’s like. Besides, sometimes the woman asks the man. Sometimes there is no woman, or no man. Sometimes like my Dad, they don’t want to get married.”

  “I am generalizing,” Liam allows. “But you know what I mean. One person does valiant things to prove their worth, even if those valiant things are just taking out the trash and doing the dishes, and the other one decides they get to keep them or not.”

  “You’re still missing the point,” Jen says. “It’s a marriage, not a property contract. People choose to stay together not because one person wants and the other one consents to being wanted; they stay together because they like each other. They want to stay in each other’s company, make the other one happy, make them smile, comfort them when they’re hurt and take care of them when they’re sad and sick. The other person increases their happiness when they’re around, when the other person does something nice for them, when they do something nice for their partner. They both want and they both consent.”

  Liam leans forward. “Well said, Jennet of Carterhaugh.” His face is so close to hers, his breath a warm puff against her lips that tastes of mint and the bottle of cider they’ve been passing back and forth along the walk. “Will you let me make you happy?”

  “Sure,” Jen allows. A single kiss can’t hurt.

  He leans forward just far enough that their mouths touch. Then he giggles, lips vibrating against hers in a thrilling, delicious sensation that makes heat slide down her spine. “See?” he asks, flesh to flesh, the words smeared against her skin. “One asks, one consents.”

  Before she can answer, he pushes that clever tongue between her lips, and Jen opens for him. Opens her arms, her mouth, allows hers
elf to feel good, to feel for herself, for the first time since her father had passed. Liam kisses the scar on her stomach over, and over, and over again and produces a condom from the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie.

  “I consent,” Jen murmurs amid the late autumn roses.

  And Jennet allows herself to remember that she is a human being who deserves good things, and Liam is more than happy to help her get there.

  Jennet is more relaxed than she’s been in probably a decade. She’s just had about three spectacular orgasms on the forest floor, a hot bubble bath in her en suite, and there are no people staying over at the B&B so she was able to have dinner alone. Now she’s reading in her squashy chair, a fire crackling in the grate and really, all is well with the world.

  Somewhere out there, her lover is at home, probably doing the same.

  He could be doing it here, but he hadn’t asked. He’d just wiped his chin and handed her a bouquet of late-blooming roses fresh picked from the bush beside them, smiled his cheeky, twinkly smile, and sauntered back towards the little house he’d told her about. He’s never invited her back, either, but Jen likes to imagine it as an enchanted cottage, small and wood and covered with a carpet of ivy so thick that it would be invisible to all but those who know where and how to look. Romantic nonsense.

  She is just turning a page when a flash of blonde hair and green eyes catches her attention. At first she thinks Liam has come to visit, snuck in to the house somehow to continue what they started, and she turns with a smile and a tingle on both sets of lips. But when she looks at him, she realizes that it’s not Liam at all. It’s just the painting of Margaret and her husband. She’s still not used to having the portraits in her room.

  She smiles at Maggie and her man, and is about to resume reading when something about the portrait arrests her attention. Now that she’s really considering him, she can see that Margaret’s husband looks an awful lot like Liam. She sets aside her book and goes over to the painting, tracing the curve of his weskit with her fingers. The man was painted nearly life-sized, and up close, the detail is as remarkable as the resemblance. Well, it’s a small county, and people have been intermarrying for years. It’s entirely possible that Margaret’s husband might resemble Jennet’s new lover.